Thinking about Religion through Wittgenstein

On approaching schizophrenia through Wittgenstein

Louis Sass disputes that schizophrenia can be understood successfully according to the hitherto dominant models—for much of what schizophrenics say and do is neither regressive (as psychoanalysis claims) nor just faulty reasoning (as “cognitivists” claim). Sass argues instead that schizophrenics frequently exhibit hyper-rationality, much as philosophers do. He holds that schizophrenic language ...

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

Development of essentialist thinking about religion categories in Northern Ireland (and the United States).

Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important categories. Previous evidence from Israel suggests that k...